Notices by Julian Foad (julian@fed.foad.me.uk)

@tyil I’m with you in your position on this issue, but just please be gentle in how you respond to someone personally. I don’t know the particular case but it’s quite likely a person might actually care but just not yet grasp the full picture. It’s taken me years to progress from appreciating source code freedom, to appreciating that freedom in a system and service and ecosystem requires much more than merely freedom of the bits of source code inside it. We still don’t have good words, or system-encompassing licences or accreditations, for example, to declare that a business or ecosystem or whatever is preserving freedoms analogous to the well documented four freedoms of source code. That makes it difficult to communicate the depth of the issue. While the situation makes me mad, and I feel it’s appropriate to call attention to it using strong language in a general public message, nevertheless when we talk to an individual we might do well to remember that most individuals are well intentioned and may react better to a kind patient explanation of an issue.

@alxlg

Open tech, be afraid. Be very afraid. Microsoft owns both Visual Studio Code “VSCode” and MS-GitHub, two intertwined and utterly proprietary product-service ecosystems with a bit of open-source in their core to lure us in. Because they love open source? Yeah, no.

Soon after leaving GitPod whose technology links the two, Geoffrey Hunt last year explained their strategy and what it’s doing to our open tech world, in a great and “harrowing” article, “Visual Studio Code is designed to fracture” https://ghuntley.com/fracture/

“The future of software development tooling that is being built is closed as ****, and people seem to be okay with it…”

This is why MS-GitHub is not our friend.

This is why falling for their trick, disguising MS-VSCode as a neat “free” editor, will come back and haunt and hurt us.

Vendor lock-in double-whammy. Using open source as “a financial weapon”.

“… the biggest challenge for Gitpod, GitLab, Datacoves, OpenBB, Foam, et al lies ahead - developing open language tooling for each community where Microsoft has forked the communities over to proprietary language servers…”

If we have a grain of public spirit, if we are motivated at all by the Freedom that’s supposed to be afforded by Free-Libre Open-Source Software, we must #GiveUpGithub, we must recognise the trap, we must choose truly open #FreedomTech.

• See also my FOSS Apps Live in FOSS Forges .